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Monday, December 29, 2014

Jesus Christ = Potential

Probably just more than a week ago, I got a bit of a wake-up call. I can imagine the Lord just waiting for me to come to a certain realization, perhaps thinking, "He'll clue in soon enough. I'll be there to confirm it for Him through the Holy Ghost when He sees it."

In my efforts to come to be closer to my Heavenly Father and my Savior, Jesus Christ, I have been focusing so much on emphasizing the fact that God is our Father that I had been, unintentionally making a huge mistake. Somewhere in my mind I was... diminishing? Is that the word? Or maybe a lack of emphasis? Sure, I'll say it that way. There was a lack of emphasis on the Godhood of God, our Heavenly Father. Somewhere in my subconscious I had unintentionally induced an insufficient weight on the importance of the concept that you can say it both ways: "God is our Father" and "Our Father is God". Honestly, I think if both of those concepts are applied and thought of properly in our minds and hearts, it really is, likely, the most beautiful, comforting, empowering and joyful of all truths. What I want to focus on, with this post, is what His status as God makes possible for us as His children through Christ.

So this one, number three, is Jesus Christ = PotentialI was going to pick possibility, but the definition of potential fits my train of thought better: "The inherent ability or capacity for growth, development, or coming into being."Oh man I love that! Especially the part where it says inherent! Remember this for later.

I'll relate to the potential part of this now. The beauty of the Atonement of Jesus Christ is that it allows us to be forgiven, healed, cleansed, changed and empowered. His merits compensate for the effects of the our bad choices, His mercy, in turn, allows us to be forgiven and healed and His grace allows us to be changed, empowered and to eventually become like God, to truly reach our divine potential. It truly is infinite! I love the way Dallin H. Oaks put it. "The repenting sinner must suffer for his sins, but this suffering has a different purpose than punishment or payment. Its purpose is change."Change for the repentant sinner AND for times when suffering and weaknesses are not as a result of things that we are or are not their doing. The Atonement of Christ takes us, miraculously, to the point of forgiveness (when we choose repentance), healing and cleansing as well as to the point of changing our ability and nature so that what we can do and who we can become is literally limitless, through His grace.Speaking of grace, in 2 Nephi chapter 2 in the Book of Mormon there's a part in verse 8 that says "no flesh can dwell in the presence of God, save it be through the merits, AND mercy, AND grace of the Holy Messiah, who layeth down his life according to the flesh, and taketh it again by the power of the Spirit, that he may bring to pass the resurrection of the dead, being the first that should rise" [emphasis added]. I love that this verse emphasizes that He had the capacity to provide the merits, mercy AND grace needed to live the way He did and Atone for us and thus save us from the effects of the fall, provided we follow His example and apply His Atonement for us in our lives.Please excuse me while I digress a bit to connect this to my next point. I'm one of those kinds of gamers who gets bored really easily playing the same parts of a game over and over again. I love games where there are so many different things to do and so much to achieve that it's really easy to almost never encounter the same situation from the same angle/perspective more than a few times, or even once. With that in mind, for me, the changing power of the Jesus Christ is such a joyous thing for me because, if I follow Him the best I possibly can, His merits and mercy and grace come in and make my potential absolutely limitless, no boundaries of any kind, including mortal perspective. Referring to the use of the word inherent from earlier, that is what our potential, inherently, really is.Limitless, because of Jesus Christ.When full comprehension and understanding of this principle is reached, I can't even imagine, at this point, how full, beautiful, wonderful and blissful our joy will be in the eternities.But I do know one thing, no matter what the Lord sees fit that I need to experience in this life to get to that point, that state of being, I'll do whatever it takes to get there, because I want to be that happy.

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